Mundane white supremacy: considering everyday dynamics of race, space, classroom relationships, and the need for a cooperative classroom management

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how mundane forms of white supremacy unfold within everyday classroom interactions, and how they extend from the way that classroom spaces are oriented to specific relational norms. Drawing upon a qualitative study of classroom relationships, relational philosophy and phenomenologies of space, race, and gender, this paper argues that normative spatial orientation in classrooms corresponds with white students being afforded a racialising access to being at ease in the classroom while students of colour are exposed to forms of existential enclosure. In response, this paper argues that classroom management practices need to directly consider strategies for reorienting classroom spaces away from mundane forms white supremacy. To do so, teachers must move away from traditionally individualising classroom management approaches that are rooted in a racial capitalist paradigm, and towards relationally explicit and ontologically dynamic approaches that are fundamentally cooperative.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom management
• classroom relationships
• white supremacy
• phenomenology
• race
• space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Throughout this article I use decapitalised versions white, whiteness, and white supremacy, while opting to capitalise Black, Brown, Indigenous and Queer to represent shared sociopolitical histories that inform identity and experience. Capitalised versions of “Whiteness/White Supremacy’’ have been previously used to signal their social systemic and structural attributes. I believe this paper clearly presents a recognition of the multiscalar systemic attributes of white supremacy. Additionally, white supremacists and neo-nazi organisations advocate for the capitalisation of ‘White’, and I try my very best to not follow the lead of white supremacists.

2. In suggesting that subjectivity is fundamentally intercorporeal, Merleau-Ponty is not arguing that individual beings and the world around them are one in the same. Quite the contrary. Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that the individual defines the world and is defined by the world vis-à-vis actively moving through it. This kinetic co-constitution, this ontological folding, is defined through difference; through bodies perceiving the world while existing as part of the world – we experience the world because we can be a part of other’s experiences. ‘I the seer am also visible’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 113–114). The space we exist in and the time we experience are ‘shreds of the self’ – the social world is not a multiplicity of sovereign individuals, ‘but a relief of the simultaneous and of the successive, a spatial and temporal pulp where individuals are formed by differentiation’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 113–114). What is being emphasised here is the extent to which who we are is a product of our imminently unfolding social situation.

3. All names in this study are pseudonyms in order to protect the privacy of participants. Geographic place names are also made vague in order to protect anonymity of the participating school.

4. For an in-depth exploration of phenomenology of racial embodiment as an educational research method see previous work (Seawright 2018, 2021).

5. Margonis uses the language of intersubjectivity, but his larger analysis is compatible with an understanding of intercorporeality. Throughout this paper I use intersubjectivity when I am directly engaging Margonis’s work, but it should be understood in this context as synonymous with intercorporeality.

6. Yesenia self-identified as a Latina.